Turkish Encoding & Fonts

Although modern Turkish is written in
the Roman alphabet, it is encoded as Unicode or ISO-8859-9 and requires special font and keyboard support separate from languages like
Spanish and French.

Unicode Fonts

Modern versions of many fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, Tahoman Times CE (Mac OS X) or Palatino (Mac OS X) are Unicode fonts and contain the letters needed for this language. it is recommended you transistion to the newer Unicode fonts whenever possible.

Windows Numeric Alt Codes (Word 2003/2007)

If you are using a recent version of Microsoft Word (2003+), you can use the following ALT key plus a numeric code can be used to type a Latin character (accented letter or
punctuation symbol) in any Windows application.

Activate Macintosh Keyboards for Typing

OS X Unicode Fonts

The new CE fonts for OS X (Times CE) as well as new versions of Palatino, Times New Roman, Arial and others now contain Turkish letters. It is recommended that you transition to these fonts whenever possible.

OS X Turkish Keyboard

Apple now has several Turkish keyboards, includig a QWERTY keyboard and QWERTY PC keyboard, but they only work for Unicode Aware applications such as Microsoft Office 2004, Text Edit, Dreamweaver MX, Netscape 7 Composer and others.

Browser and Font Setup

Browser Setup

Please note which fonts are needed for each platform before viewing instructions to configure your browsers in the Preferences or Tools menu. Most browsers are recommended, but older browsers like Netscape 4.7 may need more adjustments.

Fonts by Platform

Windows - Modern versions of Times New Roman, Arial, Tahoma, Courier New and many others include the correct characters. Most of these fonts are available through Windows.

Mac OS X - One of the "CE " fonts such as Times CE, Helvetica CE, Geneva CE or Lucida Unicode. Many are available from Apple.

Mac System 9 - Special third party fonts may be needed and World script should be installed.

Recommended Browsers

All modern browsers support this script. Click link in list to view configuration instructions. In some cases, you will be asked to match a script with a font.

Testing and Troubleshooting Web Sites

If you have your browser configured correctly, the Web sites above should display Turkish letters.

Manually Switch Encoding

If you see some unusual letters instead of the appropriate Turkish letters, you will need to manually switch from Western encoding to one of the Turkish encodings or Unicode under the View menu of your browser.

Another option is to compose the basic text in an international or foreign language text editor
or word processor and export the content as an HTML or text file with the appropriate encoding.
This file could be opened in another HTML editor such as Dreamweaver
or Microsoft Expression, and edited for formatting.

Other Web Tools

For Web tools such as Blogs at Penn State, Facebook, Twitter, del.icio.us, Flicker, and others, users can typically change the keyboard and input text. In most cases, this content will be encoded as Unicode.

Using Encoding and Language Codes

Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.

To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.

Declare Unicode in XHTML

No Encoding Declared

If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which
in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. Some display errors may occur.

Language Tags

Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are metadata tags which indicate the language of a page, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.

Turkish Lingua Turkish Fonts - Written for Windows 3 and Windows 95. Can get Turkish Arial and Turkish Times New Roman. From a translation company. Caution: Some older fonts are not recommended for newer versions of Windows.